Domain 4: Information Systems Operations and Business Resilience- PART 4A Flashcards
An advantage of using unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) cable for data communication over other copper-based cables is that UTP cable:
Reduces crosstalk between pairs.
Although management has stated otherwise, an IS auditor has reasons to believe that the organization is using software that is not licensed. In this situation, the IS auditor should FIRST:
Verify the software is in use through testing.
The application systems of an organization using open-source software have no single recognized developer producing patches. Which of the following would be the MOST secure way of updating open- source software?
Identify and test suitable patches before applying them.
As part of the business continuity planning process, which of the following should be identified FIRST in the business impact analysis?
Critical business processes for ascertaining the priority for recovery
Authorizing access to application data is the responsibility of the:
Data owner.
A batch transaction job failed in production; however, the same job returned no issues during user acceptance testing (UAT). Analysis of the production batch job indicates that it was altered after UAT. Which of the following ways would be the BEST to mitigate this risk in the future?
Ensure that developers do not have access to code after testing.
The BEST audit procedure to determine if unauthorized changes have been made to production code is to:
examine object code to find instances of changes and trace them back to change control records.
Business units are concerned about the performance of a newly implemented system. Which of the following should an IS auditor recommend?
Develop a baseline and monitor system usage.
A clerk changed the interest rate for a loan on a master file. The rate entered is outside the normal range for such a loan. Which of the following controls is MOST effective in providing reasonable assurance that the change was authorized?
The system will not process the change until the clerk’s manager confirms the change by entering an approval code.
Code erroneously excluded from a production release was subsequently moved into the production environment, bypassing normal change procedures. Which of the following choices is of MOST concern to the IS auditor performing a postimplementation review?
The change did not have change management approval.
A database administrator (DBA) who needs to make emergency changes to a database after normal working hours should log in:
With their named account to make the changes.
A database administrator has detected a performance problem with some tables, which could be solved through denormalization. This situation will increase the risk of:
a loss of data integrity.
The database administrator suggests that database efficiency can be improved by denormalizing some tables. This would result in:
increased redundancy.
Data flow diagrams are used by IS auditors to:
graphically summarize data paths and storage.
Doing which of the following during peak production hours could result in unexpected downtime?
Doing which of the following during peak production hours could result in unexpected downtime?
Due to resource constraints, a developer requires full access to production data to support certain problems reported by production users. Which of the following choices would be a good compensating control for controlling unauthorized changes in production?
Provide and monitor separate developer login IDs for programming and for production support
During a change control audit of a production system, an IS auditor finds that the change management process is not formally documented and that some migration procedures failed. What should the IS auditor do next?
Gain more assurance on the findings through root cause analysis.
During a data center audit, an IS auditor observes that some parameters in the tape management system are set to bypass or ignore tape header records. Which of the following is the MOST effective compensating control for this weakness?
Staging and job setup
During a human resources (HR) audit, an IS auditor is informed that there is a verbal agreement between the IT and HR departments as to the level of IT services expected. In this situation, what should the IS auditor do FIRST?
Confirm the content of the agreement with both departments.
During an application audit, an IS auditor is asked to provide assurance of the database referential integrity. Which of the following should be reviewed?
Foreign key structure
During an application audit, the IS auditor finds several problems related to corrupt data in the database. Which of the following is a CORRECTIVE control that the IS auditor should recommend?
Proceed with restore procedures.
During an assessment of software development practices, an IS auditor finds that open source software components were used in an application designed for a client. What is the GREATEST concern the auditor would have about the use of open source software?
The organization and client must comply with open source software license terms.
During an audit of a small company that provides medical transcription services, an IS auditor observes several issues related to the backup and restore process. Which of the following should be the auditor’s GREATEST concern?
The company stores transcription backup tapes offsite using a third-party service provider, which inventories backup tapes annually.
During an audit of a small enterprise, the IS auditor noted that the IS director has superuser-privilege access that allows the director to process requests for changes to the application access roles (access types). Which of the following should the IS auditor recommend?
Implement a properly documented process for application role change requests.
During an implementation review of a recent application deployment, it was determined that several incidents were assigned incorrect priorities and, because of this, failed to meet the business service level agreement (SLA). What is the GREATEST concern?
The support model was not properly developed and implemented.
During fieldwork, an IS auditor experienced a system crash caused by a security patch installation. To provide reasonable assurance that this event will not recur, the IS auditor should ensure that:
the client’s change management process is adequate.
During maintenance of a relational database, several values of the foreign key in a transaction table have been corrupted. The consequence is that:
the detail of involved transactions may no longer be associated with master data, causing errors when these transactions are processed.
During the audit of a database server, which of the following would be considered the GREATEST exposure?
Default global security settings for the database remain unchanged.
During the review of an enterprise’s preventive maintenance process for systems at a data center, the IS auditor has determined that adequate maintenance is being performed on all critical computing, power and cooling systems. Additionally, it is MOST important for the IS auditor to ensure that the organization:
performs maintenance during noncritical processing times.
During the review of an in-house developed application, the GREATEST concern to an IS auditor is if a:
manager initiates a change request and subsequently approves it.
During the review of data file change management controls, which of the following BEST helps to decrease the research time needed to investigate exceptions?
Transaction logs
Emergency changes that bypass the normal change control process are MOST acceptable if:
management reviews and approves the changes after they have occurred.
An enterprise uses privileged accounts to process configuration changes for mission- critical applications. Which of the following would be the BEST and appropriate control to limit the risk in such a situation?
Ensure that supervisory approval and review are performed for critical changes.
The FIRST step in the execution of a problem management mechanism should be:
exception reporting.
The GREATEST advantage of using web services for the exchange of information between two systems is
efficient interfacing.
A hard disk containing confidential data was damaged beyond repair. If the goal is to positively prevent access to the data by anyone else, what should be done to the hard disk before it is discarded?
Destruction
If a database is restored using before- image dumps, where should the process begin following an interruption?
Before the last transaction
In an online transaction processing system, data integrity is maintained by ensuring that a transaction is either completed in its entirety or not at all. This principle of data integrity is known as:
atomicity.
In a relational database with referential integrity, the use of which of the following keys would prevent deletion of a row from a customer table as long as the customer number of that row is stored with live orders on the orders table?
Foreign key
In a small organization, developers may release emergency changes directly to production. Which of the following will BEST control the risk in this situation?
Approve and document the change the next business day.
In auditing a database environment, an IS auditor will be MOST concerned if the database administrator is performing which of the following functions?
Installing patches or upgrades to the operating system
In evaluating programmed controls over password management, which of the following is the IS auditor MOST likely to rely on?
A validity check
An IS auditor analyzing the audit log of a database management system finds that some transactions were partially executed as a result of an error and have not been rolled back. Which of the following transaction processing features has been violated?
Atomicity
An IS auditor determined that the IT manager recently changed the vendor that is responsible for performing maintenance on critical computer systems to cut costs. While the new vendor is less expensive, the new maintenance contract specifies a change in incident resolution time specified by the original vendor. Which of the following should be the GREATEST concern to the IS auditor?
Application owners were not informed of the change.
An IS auditor discovers that developers have operator access to the command line of a production environment operating system. Which of the following controls would BEST mitigate the risk of undetected and unauthorized program changes to the production environment?
Hash keys are calculated periodically for programs and matched against hash keys calculated for the most recent authorized versions of the programs.
An IS auditor discovers that some hard drives disposed of by an enterprise were not sanitized in a manner that would reasonably ensure the data could not be recovered. In addition, the enterprise does not have a written policy on data disposal. The IS auditor should FIRST:
determine the sensitivity of the information on the hard drives.
An IS auditor discovers that some users have installed personal software on their PCs. This is not explicitly forbidden by the security policy. Of the following, the BEST approach for an IS auditor is to recommend that the:
security policy be updated to include the specific language regarding unauthorized software.
An IS auditor examining the security configuration of an operating system should review the:
parameter settings.
An IS auditor finds out-of-range data in some tables of a database. Which of the following controls should the IS auditor recommend to avoid this situation?
Implement integrity constraints in the database.
An IS auditor finds that a database administrator (DBA) has read and write access to production data. The IS auditor should:
assess the controls relevant to the DBA function.
An IS auditor finds that database administrators (DBAs) have access to the log location on the database server and the ability to purge logs from the system. What is the BEST audit recommendation to ensure that DBA activity is effectively monitored?
Forward database logs to a centralized log server to which the DBAs do not have access.
An IS auditor finds that the data warehouse query performance decreases significantly at certain times of the day. Which of the following controls would be MOST relevant for the IS auditor to review?
User spool and database limit controls
An IS auditor has been assigned to conduct a test that compares job run logs to computer job schedules. Which of the following observations would be of the GREATEST concern to the IS auditor?
There were instances when some jobs were overridden by computer operators.
An IS auditor has discovered that a new patch is available for an application, but the IT department has decided that the patch is not needed because other security controls are in place. What should the IS auditor recommend?
Assess the overall risk, then recommend whether to deploy the patch.
An IS auditor is assessing services provided by an Internet service provider (ISP) during an IS compliance audit of a nationwide corporation that operates a governmental program. Which of the following is MOST important?
Review the service level agreement.